The advice being given to most developers at the "you too can be a DotCom 3.0 Remix Example" presentations is to budget 10-25% of your product cost going to technology licenses. I have a local )^( friend that imports custom niche cell phones, they hit him hard when he hit volume.

The problem with being able to "implement the device described in the patent" is that any bozo who approaches the problem will be able to implement the device. The patent, however, is written so convolutedly and so vaguely and with so many internal contradictions that any device which solves the problem, even if it uses the techniques which are actually laid out in the patent (in this case, a lot of batch processing rather than maintaining a live database) is going to be a target.

And unless you've got a couple of million bucks in your legal fund this means that the yahoos who play the legal game are going to make out better than the people who can actually implement good systems.

Which is kinda why I'm seeing myself heading over into learning how to play the stupid legal game territory.

Step one in patent reform: if a practitioner of the art can't implement the device described in the patent, then it's invalidated on the grounds of intentional obfuscation.

Step two in patent reform: adjust the length of time for a patent to cover "a lifetime" in the industry. So, for farm implements, that's like what? Twenty years? For software, that's around two-three years (I think that was the original intent of the 20 year life time---back in the late 1700s/early 1800s product lifetimes were longer than today).